WANGST

Chapter six

And then… she returned.

Disclaimer: I do not own Yu Yu Hakusho. I never have, I never will. I don't even have a witty disclaimer to go with it.

---

Gary-Marty-Stu-Sam lived in the Desert of Erotica which resided under the rule of the Underthing King. He lived in the rolling red-gold sands of the desert dotted with high plateaus and he couldn't be more miserable. Sometimes he fooled around with pretty young ladies and he was still miserable. In fact, the only adjective that was allowed to be in conjunction with Gary-Marty-Stu-Sam's actions was the word miserable.

He was chained to the side of a cliff.

This was not, in fact, why he was miserable.

He wasn't even miserable about the fact he suffered from a horrible clinical condition called death. He tried not to let it get to him too much. Necromancy was always a possible solution to this minor problem, and his sister creatures the Mary-Sues were always bringing people back to life. In fact, he thought his future looked pretty bright.

He was miserable, however, because the gods have given him a task and there was a sword stuck in his chest.

"Excuse me," he said. "You there. Tall fella with the foxy lady by his side."

Sensui turned to see a man who seemed to be stuck to the bottom of a cliff, owing to the fact that he was impaled and there seemed to be some type of chain contraption. The man waved him over.

"You seem like a nice, strong, masculine, heterosexual man," began Gary-Marty-Stu-Sam miserably hopeful.

"Uhm," said Sensui.

"Exactly," Gary-Marty-Stu-Sam went on. "So why don't you try pulling out this here sword. It bestows magical powers on whoever pulls it out."

"How do you know?"

Gary-Marty-Stu-Sam looked at Sensui suspiciously.

"Haven't you ever read—whatssum?—Arthurian legends? Arthur pulls the mighty sword from the stone and—"

"But how do you know?" asked Sensui, who had a nasty penchant for pointing out things other people didn't like. "You just called it a legend. How is it that definitive proof for the transference of thaumaturgical powers?"

"You have no sense of imagination, do you?" asked the Stu, miserably.

"Not really. Never had a use for it."

"Just pull it out."

Gripping the sword, Sensui began to pull.

"Does it have a name?" asked Koto.

"What?"

"You know, a name. All famous legendary swords have one."

"Yeah, it's called The Throbbing Salami of Love."

Sensui jerked it out then asked, "What?"

Gary-Marty-Stu-Sam held up his decaying hands innocently, "They were a little self-conscious back in the old golden days. Y'know." He added, "Er, d'you think you could stab me with it?"

"What for?" Koto wanted to know. "We have to get going soon anyway."

The Stu rattled his chains.

"Where are you heading? Can I come?"

Sensui and Koto distinctly avoided looking at each other and edged away.

"Ah, so you don't have anywhere particular in mind. In that case, could you please stab me? More than once? When I get resurrected I'd like to look all manly. Because bleeding profusely from outrageous and unrealistic wounds makes one pretentiously manly. The same applies to carrying around bazookas and wearing togas. It's a… rite of manhood, you understand."

The taller canon character shrugged and thrust his Throbbing Salami of Love into the man. This was done several times until Sensui paused, sword poised.

"Something about this seems wrong."

"I'm only a helpless man chained to a cliff where a stranger is prodding me with his Salami of Love. Nothin' wrong with that."

"It's amazing how far an euphemism can really go," remarked Koto.

"Leaving," said Sensui, doing just that and taking the sword with.

"Hey, wait up!"

And soon there was nothing more but two pairs of footprints in the sand in the very dry, very uninteresting desert of Erotica, which were even sooner swept away by the wind of the brewing storm. The man still chained to the bottom of a giant plateau that sat in the middle of the desert watched as a fuzzy black cloud spewing small rivulets of electricity passed by.

"Interesting," noted Gary-Marty-Stu-Sam.

With a clinking sound the chains fell to his feet and, with a quick adjustment to his hair, the Stu set off after Koto and Sensui.

---

Yusuke looked around the multi-layered silvery world. They were speeding through it, like comets, passing by the gyrating, dancing lights in colors Yusuke didn't recognize.

He wanted to ask, "Where are we?" But somehow he couldn't grasp the concept of "we" at the moment. When a soul and heart had been tugged at enough times, by thousands of pale, lady-like monsters, prying it further and further from itself, sometimes pieces break off and remain lost forever. Sometimes the bits never come back together, because too many people end up taking the bits with them forever. The Sues had taken all the little chipped off bits of Yusuke, all the little parts that were easy to crack, easy to break…

But now, with his soul pulled out thin, hurtling through the silvery, multifaceted world and dancing lights, Yusuke felt, well, more together. As if the little bits had returned to him somehow.

"We're in the Sue-Network, aren't we?" he asked, when he mastered his vocal chords. Yusuke had the ability to figure things out for himself.

Kurama nodded vaguely. He seemed pretty overwhelmed despite the fact that it hardly showed on his face. He would be, thought Yusuke, he had more bits taken out of him.

The Sue-Network connected everything. It connected everyone. It connected every Sue. Everything that entered the Sue-Network immediately became connected with the very Sue Ego. Everything that had been taken, everything that had been warped, everything that had been tainted, corrupted, destroyed, mangled, lost, created, or imagined, existed in the Sue-Network. They were now a part of it, and everything they'd lost, they got back.

"How is she doing this?" asked Keiko. She was looking at Yukiei.

Yukiei was glowing. She was gripping her manual so tight her knuckles were turning white, and her eyes were shut closed, and she was glowing.

"I don't think even Sues are supposed to be able to do this," commented Botan, looking around at the Network.

"But Sues can do everything, right?"

"I think," started Botan, "I think, it has something to do with what they believe they can do."

Keiko was quiet for a moment, then remarked, "What don't Sues believe they can do?"

"This, apparently."

Hurtling through the Network, faster than the speed of thought, suddenly the world opened up, as they continued to plummet onwards, swallowed by a mesh of sparks.

---

Sensui gripped the sword tightly.

"What's wrong?" asked Koto.

Sensui didn't answer but instead, paused and released his grip on the sword slightly. It swayed. He unsheathed it, but had difficulty doing so, as it began fighting his grasp. It took both Sensui and Koto to tackle it to the ground.

"What's with that thing?" Koto asked once Sensui had his sword under control. It was pointing due south.

Experimentally, he took a few steps in that direction. The sword ceased struggling. Wordlessly, Sensui headed south.

---

Yukina knelt down on the marsh bank knowing Youko Kurama's golden eyes watched her as she did so. Carefully, she reached out and took hold of the black suitcase in her slender white fingers.

"Well?" asked the demon, his tail twitched impatiently. He was irritated Yomi had switched the goods into the backpack, the extraneous item Youko had not thought they needed, and not the classier case. The case had style. The goods deserved to be in it and not the ratty backpack.

"It's warm," breathed the girl. Her fingers found the silver latches.

"Wait," warned the fox thief. The girl hesitated and the demon continued, "You don't know what's in there."

"I think," said Yukina, putting her ear on the case and listening intently, "I do."

Youko watched the girl run her hands over the case like she was searching for something, or listening with her fingers. His tail flicked back and forth twitching as the marsh flies landed on his skin. They were currently standing in the middle of a swamp better known as Mushy Fluff. Apparently, the lands which hung around had been made of sugar and fluff and had infected itself with enough toothaches and cavities that the water had dissolved into thick, brown syrup and the land into frothy bread pudding which stuck to travelers' shoes.

He glared at a cotton candy cattail for a moment before he turned around, ignoring Yukina and murmured quietly, "She's supposed to be here by now."

Youko Kurama had not, in fact, played Candy Land. If he had, he would not have chosen to compare the game with his current environment. The Mushy Fluff swamp was far more depressing than the original. There were bright pink and blue cotton candy cattails everywhere which purred and sang whenever you tried to push your way past them, and most times, they melted onto your limbs like infectious colorful clouds and clung to your skin saying phrases like, "I'll love you forever," and "This is True Love, you just don't know it yet." Not to mention that the ground, the bread pudding, practically fizzled with affection wherever anyone walked on it. It was impossible to stand anywhere for long before sinking deep into the burning, acidic, flesh-eating syrup of the swamp.

Youko tore a bubbly pink cotton candy cloud from his arm.

"But I love you!" it said as he squashed it with his foot.

The demon surveyed the swamp, looking for someone.

"It has a heartbeat," Yukina whispered to herself, pale, slender fingers reaching for the silver latches.

"Don't," Youko hissed, glaring over his shoulder as the small ice maiden opened the case slowly.

Yukina stared into the dark of the case and bright blue eyes stared back.

"I know what you are," she told the thing inside the box. The eyes blinked at her. "I know what you can do. You can help."

"No," said the Thing. "There are many things I can do, but the thing you'd ask me to do would turn me into one of Them. I cannot save you."

"But you're—" Yukina stared deep into the case, trying to peer past the darkness, "you're from Imagination, aren't you? You're like Them."

"I am anything anyone wants me to be," said Thing.

"So you can—!"

"No," said Thing. "I am whatever anyone can imagine. I can do whatever anyone dreams. I am powerful and limitless and They don't affect me. But I will not turn into one for you. Power must be given limits, and limits must be given form."

"You refuse to help then," Youko said, looking over his shoulder again at the case in the marsh grass.

"I never said that," said Thing.

"You will?" asked Yukina.

"I never said that either."

It occurred to Youko they were heading about this the wrong way.

"You know what we want. What do you want?"

Lips neither canon character could see parted, "Form. Shape me the way I'm supposed to be."

It was then Kuroko's sinking boat reached the sugary shores.

---

"Nice dress," Shizuru told Yusuke. "Is that a petticoat?"

"Sh-shut up," said Yusuke blushing furiously. He pointed an accusing finger. "What's with the bondage gear?"

"Lady Shizuka?" squeaked Yukiei, knock-kneed.

"Ah," said Shizuru, one hand on her hip, leather clothing shining in the afternoon sun that filtered in from the window. "It's you."

"Lady?" inquired Kurama, trying not to eye all the black leather with too quizzical a look.

"Shizu…ka?" asked Botan, whose eyes couldn't seem to move from the riding crop in the woman's hand. Shizuru gave the blue-haired girl a very weary look.

"I changed the last two letters in my name and it's like I'm a completely different person to them, you know? They made me a teacher." Shizuru leaned against the dark wooden desk in the classroom. "Although I did have to give up smoking in order to keep up the disguise. They told me real flawed women didn't have any real flaws."

Botan looked around the classroom. Strange instruments hung from the walls, worrying manacles seemed to be attached to the floor, and sunlight streamed in from the wide, open window making everything sparkle. There was an analog clock that hung from the wall in front of the classroom that happily expressed the time as five fourths past twenty-six o' clock.

"That doesn't make any sense," Botan said, looking at the clock.

"That's what I told them," Shizuru continued, picking up a stack of papers from her desk. "But then they said that I was thinking too much like an Original Character. Making sense isn't sensible."

She was placing single sheets of paper on the desks and most of them seemed to be heavily marked in red. Kurama picked up one of the papers that had a large, fat F- on it.

"All these answers are correct," he said.

"Yeah, I know, but they don't."

"You're a saboteur!" Keiko gasped, suddenly.

"No she's not!" Yukiei yelled, hands bunched into fists. The purple-haired fox-eared Sue rounded on Keiko. "She's the greatest professor I've ever had. She taught me the Stance of the Nagging Flea! And the Stance of the Magic Tree! And she taught me what to do when I'm in trouble!"

"Really?" asked Yusuke, "And what's that?"

"Find a way to solve the problem!"

"Ah," said Kurama watching Shizuru continue to pass out papers, "it is sabotage then. A normal Sue wouldn't solve her own problem. Instead, she'd get us to do it for her. Or angst about it, pretending to try to solve things on her own, until we stepped in and did everything for her. Shizuru, you're brilliant."

"Damn straight," Shizuru muttered, "but I was mostly irritated at the time when I came up with it. Far too many Sues have no idea how to tie their own shoes. They just magic them on and go."

"But… but you're one of the head professors," Yukiei started. Crystalline tears might have filled her eyes at one time, but this time they were just regular tears. They didn't even roll off her cheeks and fall onto the single petal of a blooming flower. "You're one of the most prestigious… I thought that… but what about… how could you—?"

"Yukiei," sighed Shizuru, placing the last paper on a damaged, bloodstained desk in the back. "Yukiei Jakou. I remember you. You were one of the worst students I ever had. Of course you'd use those silly made-up stances. That's the point."

"Y-You are a saboteur," cried the Sue. "I can't believe I ever called you Lady!"

Shizuru didn't say anything for a while. She returned to the front of the room and leaned back against her desk right next to the floral-decorated iron maiden. The woman tapped a foot thoughtfully, and Yusuke realized she was wearing some awfully pointy footwear.

"What did you learn here?" the woman asked softly, in what Keiko recognized as one of Shizuru's more contemplative tones.

"Nothing of value, apparently," Yukiei spat.

"Look," Shizuru said sharply, picking up the riding crop and waving it in the Sue's face. "You can either sit here and whine all day about how I'm suddenly this horrible person for fooling you all and messing you up, or you can deal with it, suck it up, and tell me what you really learned."

Yukiei looked at Shizuru just as sharply.

"And I'm not talking about being a Sue either," Shizuru continued. "I mean what you really learned that's really real and has nothing to do with being a Sue, getting good grades, and living in Fandom."

Yusuke tugged Keiko's feather boa.

"Hey, what's Fandom?" he whispered.

"Oh, it's a silly place," said Keiko, "Nothing important, honest."

"I learned…" began Yukiei, thinking deeply, which was hard with such a shallow mind, so she tried imagining she was thinking instead.

A Mary-Sue isn't human. That's the whole point, really. Oh, they inhabit human-shaped bodies, and there's the occasional nonhuman-shaped ones too, but they aren't really human—or at least they're not human in the same way that a human is human. Humans are rife with things like flaws, hardship, failure, and zits. In fact, it was probably a basic component of humanity to possess at least three of these four things. Humans seemed to be born to toddle around the universe never knowing where they were going and were always trying so hard to get to the next step, wherever that was. Mary-Sues never had this problem.

Mary-Sues were born from dreams, sometimes wet dreams, but dreams nevertheless. They walked through the universe with legs woven from the silk of stars and peered at things through eyes crafted from glittering rainbows. Their voices were like the audio equivalent of the setting sun, shining red against the coming backdrop of the diamond encrusted night and their hair flowed and shimmered like the tail of ghosts. They reached out and embraced the world, their caress as brief as an ever-lasting blizzard, and their touch as soft and kind as frostbite.

Mary-Sues were born from dreams and destined to be great at whatever they did. Humans are born, rather sloppily, and went though life wanting, and needing, and choosing. Humans, in general, lived. Mary-Sues… stood still.

Yukiei had been born in a field of dreams and clovers fully grown. You didn't get given a Past until later after some amount of schooling—this is why so many Sues' Pasts didn't make sense or have lasting effects. They'd never had the practice.

Yukiei watched Lady Shizuka—Lady Shizuru—carefully. Now that it had been confirmed, she could see past the meticulous disguise. There was dark lipstick, and eye liner, and bondage gear, and the most dangerous-looking heels in the world, but beyond that, hidden not all that deeply, she could see the canon character. Yukiei might have wondered how she couldn't see it before, she might have asked herself how she could have missed the lack of sparkle in her hair, or the absolute lack of grace to her movement, or the human sensibilities. Yukiei might have asked herself these things, but she didn't. Because she already knew.

"We don't learn, do we?" she asked, looking, for the first time, very self-consciously at her clothing. "I can cook perfectly, I can do complicated math algorithms, I can sing in tandem with myself. I can revolutionize the entire computer science field with a floppy disk, I can create a full-color oil painting with just three colors using only dots. I'm adept at using the Spirit Gun, the Rose Whip, and the Dragon of the Darkness Flame, and I have my own versions. Under patronizing conditions I can even turn Kuwabara into a fool using his own Spirit Sword. I know more than fifty forms of martial arts and marital arts and I can change my hair color at will. I never have to watch my weight, I never break out, I never embarrass myself. And… I never live, I never learn."

The Sue-in-Training could see Shizuru looking at her through the blur of tears. There was a frown on her face. Yukiei dashed the tears away with an angry hand.

"What about now?" the brown-haired woman asked. Yukiei nearly flinched. There was steel in Shizuru's voice.

Yukiei looked around at the classroom at familiar desks, windows, and torture devices. She ran a hand over the back of a chair, her fingers prickling at the touch, and looked at Yusuke in the loli dress and Keiko with the feather boa. They stood close to each other, Yusuke's hand on Keiko's shoulder, watching her. Botan wore her fedora like a tiara and Kurama with his hair gelled into spikes stood awkwardly with his arms folded over his chest in the corner. They'd gone through such lengths to get here, she saw. It wasn't a matter of looking right or doing something jaw-droppingly dazzling—in fact they all looked wrong, and terrible, (what was with Kurama's fishnet shirt, and those stockings did not suit Yusuke) and maybe that was the point. They would never know for certain that what they were doing was absolutely right, that everything was guaranteed. But they went through it anyway.

The Sue's lip quivered.

Which is why they learned and she never did.

"I can help you," she said. "I want to."

"No offense, lady, but we've seen your kind of help," Yusuke told her.

"…I can help you help yourselves. What do you need?"

Yukiei gave a weak smile.

There was a moment of tentative silence and then…

"Okay," said Shizuru. Yukiei let out a sigh of relief. It wouldn't be until later she realized she'd been holding her breath in anticipation. She wasn't used to anticipation, it spoke too much of being uncertain, of being human.

"I've got a plan," Shizuru continued. She walked around to her desk, her shoes going clip-clop on the wooden flooring, and bent over to rummage in her desk. Everyone looked away. "Where is it—?"

That was when Yukiei collapsed, white-eyed, to her knees, and the Sue-Network boiled with rage.

---

Author's Note: This is an odd chapter if only because it's not as funny as the other ones, but I also think it's because it's kind of an in-between chapter where everything is building up.

I want to thank everyone who sent me messages over the years I haven't updated and kept my mind on this fic. I always intended to update, but life always got in the way. So this chapter, innuendoes and all, is dedicated to every one of you dogged determined individuals who just want a goddamn finished story. Thank you. Truly.

-KowaretaTsubasa